Honoring the High Holidays

This year I turned down the offer to be honored by reading Torah during the High Holidays. Perhaps I was aware that I would be too busy watching NCIS reruns to prepare my portion. But I suspect my motivations lie elsewhere. I am inclined to think that they date back to Yom Kippur 35 years when I watch in horror as a fist fight broke out in a small Sephardic shule in Zichron Yaakov. As a volunteer on Kibbutz Maayan Tzvi, I had walked up the steep road into town to daven on this holiest day of the year only to have my sense of spiritual calm shattered by this unholy pugilistic display. Through my limited understanding of Hebrew I was able to discern that, in the tradition of this shule, honors on the High Holidays were auctioned off to the highest bidder and one particularly well to do congregant consistently outbid all others for the choice approbations. Thus, the Day of Atonement fist-a-cuffs.

Since that day, I have wondered about our communities’ tradition of doling out honors on our holiest of days. On these days of atonement, when we intone that God sits above in the heavens judging one soul and another, I wonder what gives us the right, the authority to judge that select congregants are more worthy to stand before God. Who are we to say that, for instance, the vice chair of the social committee is more holy or more deserving than a single mother who spends long days and sleepless nights caring for a child with special needs, a daughter who travels hundreds of miles each month to comfort her aged mother or a congregant who volunteers at a shelter for battered women. I am inclined to think that, on these days of awe, the most deserving of praise is the new comer who, alone and filled with trepidation, enters our spiritual home and stands amongst strangers, to worship before God.

I know enough to understand that all organizations, even spiritual ones, require hierarchies and that these organizations are built and sustained by the hard work and ongoing efforts of a select few. These caring individuals, who dedicate time and resources to our synagogues and temples, deserve thanks and recognition. But on these days when we come face to face with the Divine, who among us will claim to be more worthy than another? In my thinking, that’s God’s turf.

Thus, I would like to propose two new traditions for consideration:

1. Those who, because of their commitment to our community, are given honors, should be offered the opportunity to hand these honors to strangers, to newcomers. Upon arriving at the bimah, the rabbi or gabbi might say something to the effect: “The honor of the second aliyah has been given to Gil Schwartz, Vice President of our Board of Directors. Gil has shared his honor with Mr. and Mrs. Irving Levine who are visiting our congregation for the first time. We are so pleased to welcome Mr. and Mrs. Levine.” Thus, Vice President Schwartz is recognized for his service and Mr. and Mrs. Levine feel welcomed to our congregation.

2. For one aliyah on one day, perhaps the last aliyah of the Yom Kippur morning services, the entire congregation should be called up to the Torah to be honored. Rather than 1,000 people or so all crowding on the bimah, the entire congregation would rise and recite the blessings together. The message: On this, the holiest day of the year, all the members of our congregation and our community are to be honored. Some have made significant contributions to our shule; others have engaged in quiet, private acts of tzdakah and gimilut hasadim. Still others deserve the “zichut”, the merit, reaching out to God and reaching out to the Jewish people on these holiest days of the year.

Who knows, as God on high weights the deeds of the Jewish people, it may be a stranger’s single act of joining our congregation for one day that tips the scales. Alternatively, it might be our act to welcome the strangers among us that does the trick.